American poet Jessica Smith’s long-awaited second trade collection, life-list (Victoria TX: chax press, 2015), is a remarkable
collection of expansive and exploded lyrics stretched and pulled apart to form
staccato breaches into memory, multilinearity, meaning and language. As she explains in a recent interview posted over at Touch the Donkey: “I want to use the whole space of the page and
approach it like a kind of blend between painting and poem, in that the words
are usually arranged roughly left-right, top-bottom, but not entirely. I see
the space of the page as already having a certain “weight,” like it’s not a
blank/silent space, and that concept was molded for me by John Cage, Marcel
Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Steve McCaffery. I was also inspired, early on, by
installation art, which along with sculpture is still what excites me the most:
I want the audience to physically participate in the making of the object.” Structured
into two sections—“observation” and “memory” (a selection of the second section published as a chapbook, here)—the poems in life-list,
published a full nine years after the appearance of her Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices, 2006), suggest far more
might be possible, with further titles in what could simply be the opening work
of something far larger. If this is Smith writing out a “life list,” how many
entries might there be?
Part
of what is remarkable about Smith’s work is her use of fragment and space,
allowing the poems such a breadth of multiple readings and meanings, even while
allowing a strong intuitive narrative grounding. There is something lovely and
deceptively light in the way her poems accumulate so subtly into such hefty, serious
weight, pinging across the margins of the book in ways that deserve as much to
be heard aloud as experienced upon the page. Further in her Touch the Donkey interview, she responds:
I choose the page as a
constraint: Often when I asked for poems for periodicals, I ask the editor
about the margins, page size, and font, and then I write a poem specifically
for the magazine within those constraints. When I write a larger project on my
own, I choose my own visual constraints. I enjoy writing by hand on square
pages, but when I transfer drafts to the computer I try to choose standard
printer sizes for paper and margins and standard, readable typefaces. I am
constrained by the current standards of publishing, but I choose the constraint
for myself with an eye to publishing because I want a larger audience than the
kind of micropublishing that non-standard pages/typefaces would require. So,
yes, I sometimes feel limited by page space, but the limitation is positive. I
need boundaries! It helps me concentrate on other things.
No comments:
Post a Comment